I'm sitting at my dining table, slightly hungry for only having a spring roll and christmas cookie for dinner, listening to the beautiful music from The Shape of Water (what a great movie) soundtrack loudly because I have the house to myself for a few days, writing this. I'm proud to have my own website now. I will focus on highlighting my personal work here, but, because of the writing that I do, the professional and personal collide.
An introduction to my work:
I am a man who wears many hats; I am beginning the journey as a writer, performer, theatre director, producer, and, most recently, professional photographer. I have always loved artistic hybrids--my first professional theatre job was as a stage manager for performances called Artistic Blind Dates (ABD) in which groups of 3 artists who work in different media collaborate to make short performance art pieces. As a stage manager, and later, a producer, I worked with video artists, acrobats, dancers, choreographers, writers, food artists, opera singers, and more. Each group challenged me to think beyond how I learned how to create art. Some of the works were obscure, opaque, or unfinished, but I say, "bring it on!" Audiences should be questioning all art. Art should not be easy for audiences. Good art changes people and change is difficult. I try to use my hats to make people see things that they wouldn't usually see, feel things that they wouldn't usually see, and feel things they wouldn't usually feel.
This is a picture from a particularly moving ABD featuring Claire Alrich, photo cred Teresa Wood, 2016
I am trying to leave the life of a stage manager. There are a few companies or artists that I will still work for in this capacity, but my heart has always been on the artistic side of things and I have the means now to pursue them.
An introduction to who I am:
My current headshot, courtesy of Jim Cassatt, 2015
I suppose the way to separate my work from who I am and to contextualize what you see here is to establish a strong autobiography. My audiences should know that I am a queer white cis-man from a upper-middle class family.
Why queer? I haven't really found an established sexual orientation that fits how I feel. The closest that I have found is bi-romantic and heterosexual, but I'm more comfortable embracing a more fluid identity than branding myself with those labels.
Why white? Well, the easy answer is because of my parents and their parents and their parents... etc. The more interesting and true answer is that race is something that white people created to make money and get power off the backs of the people we now call "of color." But I can't deny my whiteness. Race, like gender, is a sauce we are marinated in from birth and the stereotypes of race stay with us, no matter how much we deconstruct them.
Why cis-man? This has similar easy and interesting and true answers as the previous question. Sex is biological, but more fluid than most know because the idea of a sexual binary is cis-hetero-patriarchal propaganda that aims at keeping transpeople and intersex people down. Gender is a spectrum but I like to think of it more as a color wheel spectrum where there are definite colors but there are 360 degrees of extremes and less like a linear spectrum that relies on a binary of blue and pink on each end. There are times, albeit very infrequently, when I feel more feminine than masculine (another reason I'm queer), but I am almost entirely masculine presenting, so cis-man is accurate.
What's up with my family? My mom works for the State Department and is currently stationed in Baghdad. My dad is back in school for music therapy. My sister is a pharmacy tech who is applying to go back to school for nursing. I'm based out of Washington DC now but I've done and will continue to do a lot of travelling because of my mom's job. I was born in Harrisonburg, VA, a small college town in Western Virginia, and stayed there pretty statically until I was 16. My parents met there when they went to a small religious liberal arts college. They got married right out of college and started out with pretty much the skin on their backs. I believe that their first home together was a little trailer on a pig farm. My mom went on to get her graduate degree and is having a successful career as a Nurse Practitioner. My dad is more of a jack of all trades--he's a very talented musician and tinkerer who makes and plays his own instruments. It took him 30 years into his marriage with my mother, but he's finally pursuing a career that he feels passionate about that will allow him to use his talents and knowledge for good.
My high school's logo
Where did I go when I left Harrisonburg at 16 years old? My mom joined the State Department as a medical officer when I was fifteen. Her first post was Turkmenistan. When we found out that this was the case, I had less than a semester to figure out where I was going to go to school. The State Department provides a very generous stipend for high school students whose parents are in Turkmenistan, so I could basically choose to go to any boarding school in the world. (I should have mentioned earlier that my mother has a travel bug that has crawled into her brain, which is why she joined the state department. I have that same bug.) So I chose to go to boarding school in Switzerland. It's a stereotypical white person thing to do, I know, but I haven't read Catcher in the Rye yet, so I'm trying to lean away from it. The two years I was at boarding school were successively the worst and best years of my life so there is too much to tell to go into detail in this already very lengthy post, but this step was truly the beginning of my journey towards forging an international identity--which was kind of cut short in college, but that is a story for another day.
I believe I will wrap it up for today. I think I'm going to talk about my earliest experiences with art in my next post, so stay tuned for a discourse on a surprisingly dark dramatized Lewis and Clark story, a middle school art teacher who told me I was bad at art, and other reasons I can't remember my childhood.
Fun stuff, right? Photo cred Jim Cassatt